


A Withering

by kelppy



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 14:24:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6082710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelppy/pseuds/kelppy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They needed each other, but they just couldn't need the other without hurting and being hurt in return. After all, love could either be a bloom or a withering.</p><p>Mentions of alcohol, abuse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Withering

**Author's Note:**

> Let it be known that I am not glorifying or romanticising an abusive, dysfunctional relationship. This is not in support or discrimination of such relationships. I merely wish to present a situation where both Lexa and Clarke are so emotionally fucked up that they become codependent on one another and use one another as a means to cope with their issues. This is a work of fiction. And a kind of study of a relationship between two deeply troubled and scarred people. Cheers!

_He has been dissembled by her.  
And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?_

— The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

You’re in her apartment, and you’re sober, awake. Frankly it’s not much of an apartment, more a room than anything, with perspiration on the large window — the only one in the room — and peeling paint. A musky smell lingers, but beyond that you can smell winter, fresh and sharp. The mattress, a single, is on the wooden floorboards, piled with blankets and random fleece jackets. On the nightstand there’s a narrow, tall glass vase of Siberian Irises, extending just to your shoulders at standing height. You’ve jostled the thing more than once, and she had given you a pleading look, and said, “Please don’t upset the flowers.”

You’d muttered, “Not my fault the thing is a bloody hazard. Why don’t you put them on the floor?”

She frowns as if you were being the unreasonable one. “On my  _wooden_  floor? How would you like to stand on dead, preserved corpses?”

“Pretty sure corpses are already dead.” You’re quite certain it doesn’t work like that, and you think they won’t mind.

“So you see my point.”

She has a long wooden workbench facing the large window, just above the radiator, where art supplies and makeup are scattered over the table and her latest piece — it’s beginning to look more and more like the naked back of a wonderful woman — is taped to the table. Empty teacups hold parched paintbrushes and uncapped pens in them, swirls of faded colour stubbornly marking pale ceramic, dried paint residue crusting the bottom of the cups. Books stack on the other end, mostly paperbacks and leather-bound journals (which she usually uses to sketch). Next to the workbench is a little cabinet that mostly acts as an easel, supporting an empty canvas and pastels and watercolours and linseed oil.

Her clothes are either hung on the row of hooks along the wall at mid-height, or slung over her chair.

It’s the kind with a common kitchen and bathroom, and you can’t imagine how that’d be convenient in any way. The walls are thin enough that you can hear her neighbours bustle about but you think she enjoys it, makes her feel less alone.

Your apartment is nothing like hers, carries nothing of the homely, lived-in quality hers just effortlessly supplies. You like that, how she can make nearly anything feel like home.

(Home, when you turn your head into her neck and press your cold toes into her calf. When you kiss under her chin and she makes a disapproving whine because she hates that. When you move in the dark of her apartment and she beckons you to bed, in half a dream herself, and falls asleep with her face against your arm, wake up with half of her on you. When she pulls your tie loose and undoes the pearly buttons one-by-one and kisses the expanse of skin each button opens to.

When she’s having fits of anger and you just happen to be the next best thing to a punching bag. When she stands conveniently by after you’ve had a bad day at work and way too many drinks. When you’d rather fuck than talk. When she’d rather leave than talk.)

She’s left you a glass of water on the nightstand, and you drink gratefully, wearing her woollen socks and her sleep shorts.

You hear her before you see her, shouldering through the door with her hands full.

Her eyes are bright, vibrant, like the sky in midday, and she doesn’t seem too surprised to see you awake. She’s carrying a tray of breakfast foods, of different varieties and hashed together.

You sip at your water, now lukewarm, and you gesture to the tray with your glass. “You made all that?”

She rolls her eyes at you and smiles, setting the tray on the floor, between the both of you. “No. Perks of sharing a kitchen: you get to steal a bit of everything from everyone.”

“Basically it’s a buffet.”

“Of a sort.”

She tugs at your feet, where the blankets have left exposed and you scoot closer to her, and when you spot the two empty mugs, she grins.

“There’re some things you just shouldn’t share,” she says, and she pads to the coffee-maker she has plugged in unassumingly in the other corner next to the workbench.

While she brews coffee you pull on one of her fleece jackets she leaves lying around. It’s a cold morning, and you recall trying but failing to properly put on a shirt (hers, again) after she kept pulling it off you.

“Do you have work today?” she asks from where she’s squatting in front of the coffee machine.

“Not till four.” You squint around at her walls. “You don’t have a clock in here,” you say.

“Sure I do. It’s on the nightstand,” she says easily.

“That’s your phone. And it’s dead, by the way. You plugged it in but you didn’t switch on the socket.”

Her phone is a mess, cracked and chipping. And she’s quite a difficult person to reach, rarely answering calls or replying to texts. And lately she’s in a habit of leaving it to die altogether.

She makes a vague, disinterested noise and returns to you with two mugs of hot coffee, which you accept with both hands. She makes great coffee, another redeeming quality of hers.

“Is there a reason why you’ve decided to avoid communicative devices?” you ask, though it’s more of a jest than anything, only to stimulate small talk.

She looks seriously at you. “I really do try. I make an effort, really. But it just slips my mind to charge it, as you can see.”

You smirk, but the sunlight is soft on the warped glass of her window, and it’s generally still quite quiet, and so you can safely assume it is still early. She picks up a croissant, while you’re preoccupied with the pancakes, and that is how you live most mornings, sucked into her little world, back aching from having to share the small mattress, and sometimes in the middle of the night, when it’s coldest, her radiator breaks down. And you grumblingly hold her closer, if only to share warmth.

You eat dinner sometimes with her on her floor, and you bring over your laptop only because she insists hers is broken so the both of you could watch your downloaded shows.

She, of course, complains about your poor taste in t.v. shows but she watches all of them with you anyway. Indulges herself in satirical commentary that has you seeing if popcorn bounces off her hair. It’s not worth it — she forces you to eat every one you threw. Even the gross ones.

“Don’t you need a laptop? I mean you _are_ a student and all,” you say.

“Who says I don’t have one?”

“Yeah, but yours is broken,” you remind her, and you actually do spot it, tucked in a shelf of her cabinet.

“It can’t do most of the things yours can.”

“Well, if only you learnt how —” she silences you with a kiss, a tad impatient, a tactic she often employs when she tires of the subject at hand, and you promptly forget what you’ve been talking about.

You don’t ask to move in and she doesn’t offer. Mostly because it doesn’t make sense: her apartment (no,  _room_ ) is only ideal for one person, and you don’t particularly enjoy sharing communal space unless it’s with her (god, you brushed your teeth out her window because you didn’t want to use the shared bathroom). You can’t work with all the rambling and shambling of her neighbours through the thin walls. Also, you’ve always been a pessimist and she’s a realist and the both of you know some things don’t last. Her apartment is too cramped for a pessimist and realist to coexist. Your apartment is just out of the question — you just hate the place, can’t see her living in it.

She’s familiar with loss, as are you, and she’s not as closed off (not even close) but you understand her better than most.

And it comes to a point where it’s sort of unquestioned that you could see her and still see other people — you mean, the both of you have lost so much so it makes no sense to limit yourselves now; have one, have all, if you’d like. The same goes for her. You’ve found her curling up to a boy in her bed before (she gave you a key) and she’s seen you kiss girls and women in the dark. She doesn’t mind it, and you don’t think you do either.

But it’s understood that while the both of you have your respective love-lives, they should not overlap.

You know she’s not on talking terms with her mother, though she never tells you why. And you’ve had your share of scarring inside and out, and she traces them with her fingers, even kisses them sometimes, but doesn’t — would never — probe.

When she draws you her eyes are set in this determined frown, and her lips part slightly, her hair, darkly golden, tied back into a braid. Her hand moves quickly over the paper, smudged black with charcoal.

“You’re making me feel self-conscious.”

“Shut up. Do you want to be drawn like Rose or not?”

“Not particularly,” you say, a little heatedly. “You said you needed this for an assignment.”

“I do,” she says, distractedly.

She continues to sketch with a careless, loose hand. But there is a firmness and certainty in her bold strokes, and you’d only just begun to admire it now.

“When did you first know you wanted to be an artist?” you ask, purely out of curiosity.

Her eyes never leave the sketch. “When I saw you naked.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” she says. “Your eyes are deep phthalo green. Your hair, burnt umber in the shade, raw sienna in the light. Your skin is cream, but under your breasts and thighs and knees it’s paler.” She says all this with her eyes fixed on the toothy paper.

She’s smiling, however, and you make a face at her, which causes her to frown in disapproval when her eyes return to your form. “No, don’t do that. You’ll ruin it.”

“This isn’t for school is it.”

She laughs softly. “Nope.” She gestures to a blank space on her wall, "It's going to go up there."

And you get up from the mattress then, pulling the blankets with you and she manages to make a short sound of protest before you sit yourself on her lap and kiss her, fully and open-mouthed.

“Mmm,” is all she says with your mouth on hers, and her hands slowly reach for your face, holding you there, smudging charcoal on your face.

When you pull away she looks at the black smears and laughs a little. “You look like a raccoon.”

And from then on you’d catch her smiling oddly at you, in an out-of-context, abrupt kind of way. And when you ask her gruffly, “what.” She’d giggle slightly and say, “I was imagining a raccoon litigating in court. You'd look totally intimidating, for sure. Or, you could just sway the jury in your favour with how adorable you look. Sure you don’t want me to put it on you when you go to work?”

You push her off the mattress and onto her cold hardwood floors and her yelp is satisfying.

One day she tells you, as her hand comes to rest on your forearm, over your tattoo, “I don’t dream anymore.”

You don’t say anything, only blink blearily at her, watching her lashes tremble, her face remotely worried, not at her incapability to dream, but at how you would respond.

“I have nightmares,” you contribute, quietly. You set aside some documents you’ve been reviewing onto her floor, next to the mattress.

“Maybe you have it better than I do,” she says, and reaches up to remove your reading glasses, thumbs the shadows under your eyes.

You honestly don’t know if you do, but her hands shake and she looks shocked at how they tremble, like she doesn’t know what to do with them, or where to put them, so you guide them to your waist, under the blankets, and pull her closer. _come on, now._ Turn off the desk lamp on her bedside table and let her fall asleep on your chest. You’ll just wake up earlier to finish reviewing the document.

They call it muscle memory, the way you just somehow appear in her bed or at her door when drunk (which usually happens when you lose a case; not often at all but still inexcusable). And you’ve been told you have aggressive, confrontational tendencies that veers towards shameful (in your opinion) and inconsolable crying. She takes you in her arms every time, doesn’t hush you, doesn’t mention it if her arm hurts from where you’ve slugged a careless hand at, doesn’t say anything about how her neighbours could hear you, too. You wake up feeling like shit. The day’s begun and she lets you forget the night before, plays along with your denial. If some furniture happened to have broken sometime last night, you’d get it fixed or get to your knees and do it yourself. You’d buy her flowers, bouquets, with paralleled bruises on the petals from when you rushed to her after work. It didn’t make up for anything, you knew.

But that’s fair. She takes her frustrations out on you, too. Quivering, raised voices that permeate the walls with the potential to shake concrete buildings. Followed by softer, defeated ones. Those were the worst. Someone always leaves then, either you, or her. But it’s not permanent — she comes back, most of the time, swiping a thumb down your jaw and bringing you close so she could feel how sorry she is for yelling, for leaving, and she will explain: “I don’t want to be like my parents. Please don’t make me.” You feel obligated to nod.

It’s fair. Still, it doesn’t make it right.

“Come on,” you will say and try to catch her flailing hand. “Please don’t. Don’t leave angry.”

“Alright,” she says. “I won’t.” Draws a sharp breath to steady herself, but only manages to make herself more upset. “I won’t,” she promises. “I — _don’t touch me_. Fuck. Jesus Christ. I need to get out of here. I can’t breathe in here.” Then she pulls on her coat and goes out the door.

In one the worst fights the both of you’ve ever had, she had slammed the door. But the look on her face — brittle and shrivel-eyed and all stony anger — frightened you most. You see, you weren’t sure if she would come back this time. You grabbed the lapels of her coat, desperate.

“Where are you going?”

She shrugged your hands off viciously. “Where you can’t follow me.”

“You’re so — don’t do this. It’s late and it’s not safe,” you begged, in frustration. “In the morning. Go in the morning. Not now. It’s dark. Listen. Hey, _listen_. _Are you listening to me_? Why do you have to be so insufferable? You’re a brat, you know that? Alright, I’m sorry, sorry. Please don’t go.”

The fight spilled past the doorway and into the corridors. It must have woken the neighbours but none of them opened their doors. She tore her wrist from your grip, left it cold and wanting. Determined not to come back, she left. You had missed an entire day of work the next day waiting for her to come back — because, like it or not, you couldn’t stand the thought of something happening to her.

You were tidying up her apartment when she slipped in. Folded the blankets, sorted her brushes and pencils, gathered all her loose-leaf sketches from the floor and put them in a neat stack on her table, made sure the flowers stayed hydrated.

“Hi,” she said, back to the door. “You’re here.”

You nodded, feeling betrayed and angry but mostly sad that she chose to go. “I hadn’t expected you to come back so soon.”

“I was gone a whole night.”

You nodded, again, not trusting your voice or your brain to say the right things. She was in a volatile mood right then, but so were you. The difference was, she was acutely aware of all the right things to say to get you to forgive her. Which you do, like a sucker every time.

“You even put water in the vase. The flowers mean a lot to me, so thank you.”

You stood, dusted your pants, and said curtly, “I need to get to work.”

She pushed herself off the door. You let her approach you, warily, still looking stubbornly away from her. She touched your hair, lightly parted it where it had become disorderly, and fixed it so you looked halfway decent. “There,” she said. “Now you can go to work.”

But her eyes were at your lips. Of course. She gave you small apologetic pecks to soothe your hurts. Eventually you held the back of her head and kissed her properly, fully. Tipped her head back so she could see how desperately afraid you were, like a child who had just witnessed her parents arguing; a kind of deeply-embedded frantic fear that had you shrinking from her fingers, followed by tentative relief that she came back. You felt like you might just cry with it.

These kinds of things could damage a person.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, repeated over and over again at your philtrum, seemingly repentant in the line of your wounded gaze, like a doting, coddling spouse, “That was so stupid. I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”

When you shuddered she held your shoulders and allowed for her forehead to rest against your mouth, where your shaky breath tussled her lighter baby hairs at her hairline. Her thumbs were fitted along the slants of your collarbones, felt the tremulous breathing of harbouring sobs that you withheld. Her eyes were truly sorry, then.

“That was cruel of me,” she said.

“Yes,” you breathed. It was barely a word. Anything more and you feared you might lose control.

She kissed the side of your neck. “I was cruel.”

“Yes.”

“But that’s just how I am. Do you understand what I mean?”

You nodded; you understood perfectly what she meant.

“Still, I’m sorry. Don’t cry.”

You shook your head indignantly. Of course you weren’t going to cry. Oh but you were. Her hand slipped behind your head, into your hair and guided it downwards to her shoulder. You tightened your jaw.

Then for a while her eyes are harsh and unkind, and she refuses to do anything more with you than the occasional fuck, which bothers you more than it should. You see her pressed into a wall by her neighbour, the one with the sharp smile and fiercely intelligent eyes that borders on belligerent. And as you turn away she catches your eye and holds your gaze, unapologetic; _taunting._

It begins with a lashing heat that doesn’t sit too well in your stomach, one you recognise as jealousy. And then there’s a bone-deep ache that’s accompanied by a feeling as though your guts have been wrenched earthwards, and that one you (barely) recognise as hurt. Which then spreads into a desire to shatter glass and punch through alabaster walls, a desire for revenge. That one you know is anger. Hot and prickling. 

(If you let it, it might even fester into resentment. You're that kind of person. You have this limitless capacity to hate, and hate, and _hate_.)

So you pick those that she had already picked. You fucked her neighbour the exact same way you’d seen her do it, and it didn’t matter if she witnessed it or not. Word travels fast in that mouldy commune she calls home.

Then you prey on the boy she had taken before, the one with the soft brown eyes and the hesitant hands. He majors in the same course she does. She would smell you on him the next time she took him home.

And you’re not quite sure when you’ve grown to become such a bitter, vengeful thing, but it begins to show on her face and it makes you feel a twisted kind of satisfaction.

When she calls you over you see the scattered sketches of so many others (and that, you suspect, seems to be the primary purpose), which only makes you angrier, such that you push her roughly into a wall, a hook driven into her back, and brutally bite her on her jaw, neck, and collarbones until she gasps. You’ve always been gentle, tender with her, careful not to break skin, but you see blood now as it trickles down the side of her face from where you’ve scratched her, and somehow you falter for a moment, feeling immensely sorry.

But as you relieve her of the pressure of your weight, she surges forward to initiate something of her own, something violent and vile, and potentially cruel.

She claws at your throat and leaves gouges there, her eyes intense, in some kind of bloodlust. You are pliant when she grabs you bruisingly by your forearms and shoves you against her workbench, where it creaks and some of her things fall to the floor. Your fingers scrabble at the wood to find purchase, pushing over some sketches onto the floor as well. You think you might have broken a nail. And she cups your chin and kisses you, and you kiss back, inhaling sharply when she bites at your lips.

Then she stops too, her hands falling away from your face, from your pants, and she looks dejected and tired. You imagine you must do, too, because when she looks at you again, you are fixed with almost a tender and guilty gaze.

You lick your lips and taste blood. You reach out impulsively, but you falter, and let your palm hover over her elbow. “It’s not —” Then you stop because you’ve no idea what to say.

You were going to say that it wasn’t her fault, but it had been, and so you say instead, firmly, “I don’t blame you.”

She barks out a laugh, short and wet. It looks as though she might cry soon, and you would never know what do with that. Maybe catch her tears with clumsy, unpracticed fingers.

“I’ve hurt you too,” you say, and you hate how fiercely desperate it sounds, how desperately you wish for her to understand.  _and if you want, we can take turns pulling punches._

“You’re so fucking annoying,” she says instead, though it’s not angry at all, and she kisses you slowly, carefully, mindful of your hurt lip.

Together you move towards the mattress, and she collapses above you, pressing your body flush against hers. She kisses the torn skin down the column of your neck, and when it stings (only briefly), your jaw clenches.

“Don’t do that,” she softly says, touching the side of your jaw with light fingers. “You’ll ruin it.”

It’s only when you wake up the morning after that she finally wants to talk.

She fumbles with her fingers in her laps as she sits cross-legged in front of you, not unlike a child. You prop your head up on your elbow watching her try. Her toes are flecked with paint. A rash is beginning to form around the curve of her left shoulder, slightly above a nasty bruise.

“We’re horrible for each other,” she starts, her fingers jumping to her hair. “How is this healthy?”

“Please don’t tell me we’re breaking up,” you say, (mostly) in sarcasm. It comes out a little rushed and frenzied, and even you are surprised by this.

She locks eyes with you steadily, sombrely. “I’m serious. This is serious.”

“I know,” you sigh.

“Let’s be adults about this. Complete honesty. Total maturity. All we do is hurt each other.”

You scoff, getting up now, slightly vexed she had brought it up. It was what the both of you did, and somewhere it became less about needing each other, and more about loving each other. “We’ve never been adults about anything. If we had, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Maybe we should —”

“What?” you growl. “What do you suggest?”

She looks resigned. When she speaks, she sounds extremely exhausted that you wish for all this to be over so you can tug her back into bed and sleep the day away. “I just don’t see how I could ever be in a functional relationship with you.”

“I don’t either. I never have. I don’t care. But the fact that you are here — right now — and I’m here, and you’re not leaving or telling me to leave, says something. I need you, simple as that. And maybe,” you dare to venture. “Maybe you need me too.”

She wavers and for a moment her eyes water, and then she asks teasingly, “Are you a martyr? A masochist?”

You push a pillow into her face and she laughs, shoving it away. It’s probably not a good idea (hell, you’re filled with bad ideas, and she always plays along with them), to use each other as emotional crutches, but she’s pretty, and she’s broken, and burdened and you’re more or less the same.

And in her suffocating, claustrophobic little galaxy, you’ll always be drawn to her orbit.

She warns, “I may never love you the way you want me to.”

And you tell her, earnestly, “That’s okay. You’ll love me the only way you know how. I can’t ask for more.”

She barrels into you and kisses you so suddenly and rapidly that you struggle to kiss her back.

“I have nightmares now,” she says.

You return, “That’s okay. I don’t dream anymore nowadays.”

And she goes to bed with you. Turns off the nightlight as she does it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title extracted and adapted from Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Wrote Clarke with April Wheeler in mind, so I'm sorry if it might come off OOC.


End file.
